Biography
Born in 1983 on Treaty 4 territory in Saskatchewan, Canada, multidisciplinary composer and artist Erin Gee lives and works in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal. Her practice spans disciplines of new media art, music composition, art-science, and performing arts. She is Professeure Adjointe (Assistant Professor) in the Music Faculty at Université de Montreal.
As a DIY expert in emotional biofeedback technology, Gee’s music and performances explore the subtle and unconscious dimensions of sound, gesture, breath, voice, eye contact, and simulated haptics—treating them as manipulative tools for shaping the body and its emotional states. Her performance techniques delve into the subconscious influence of sound, drawing inspiration from emotional physiology, hypnotism, feminist theory, ASMR, and the placebo effect to challenge the authority of quantification in biofeedback and quantified self technologies. By structuring the social, emotional, and physical facets of music, Gee orchestrates listeners’ bodies within her cybernetic systems in place.
She has received commissions from Montreal-based entities such as Akousma Festival, Totem Contemporain, Ensemble Supermusique, and soprano Andrea Young. In 2023, In 2023, her performance at MUTEK Montreal was described as one of the most memorable ambient acts of the festival by Ilia Rogatchevski (THE WIRE), while journalist Simon Tremblay-Pepin described her act as one of the uniquely intellectual and challenging works in the festival lineup. Her international presence extends to exhibitions at art museums, electronic music festivals, and new music venues, with performances/exhibitions at the Karachi Biennale (PK), Centro de Arte Sonoro (AR), Toronto Biennale (CA), Ars Electronica (AT), ISEA (ES), LEV Festival (ES), MUTEK Festival (AR/ES/CA), NRW Forum (DE), and MacKenzie Art Gallery (CA).
In 2021 Gee co-founded Audio Placebo Plaza community sound art collective with Julia E. Dyck and Vivian Li. Together, they collaboratively explore the limits of healing music and placebo-led creation in community-centered sound creation.
Her article “The BioSynth: an affective biofeedback device grounded in feminist thought” won the best paper prize at the international New Interfaces for Musical Expression Symposium 2023.
Gee’s work has been featured in WIRE, neural.it, Scientific American blog, VICE, MusicWorks, and Canadian Art magazine. She has received awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Conseil des arts et lettres du Québec, as well as the Conseil des Arts de Montreal, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Saskatchewan Arts Board.
As a researcher she is actively investigating queerness, gender, digital lutherie and new instruments for musical expression, and ASMR in fields of electronic and experimental music. For more information on her academic work and for inquiries, please visit her faculty webpage at Université de Montréal.
